World Meteorological Organization squares

Transcription

>> Thank you. What I would like to do today is try to give you a feeling of how population and climate change may impact upon our ability to deal with disasters and to reduce the effects of disasters. But I'm going to start off with looking at what are the two challenges for the 21st century, and they are really climate change but also global poverty. And it's very rare that you actually get climate change people talking about the real world problems. We're so used to looking 20 or 30 years into the future, we seem to forget the state of the planet now. So let's sum up. Eight million children die needlessly every year. Eight hundred million people go to bed feeling hungry every night. One billion people have no access to clean water, and that is the state of the planet now. So anything that we are worried about in the future has to be built on the premise that we need to do something about this. So we have three major tasks; firstly, population. People are worried about population increase. By the end of this year, we will hit seven billion people. And I'm going to talk a little bit about population growth and the predictions for the future. Development. Development is essential if we're going to relieve poverty and to lift those people out of poverty into a reasonable living standard. However, we have a stagnating world economy at this moment in time. And then in just a chocking to the mix, just to make the world a little bit more complicated, we have climate change; we already have three courses of a degree warming, and that's going to set to rise into the future. But ultimately what we want to do is reduce human misery and increase human health and happiness. Sounds such a simple, wonderful thing to do. So John Bemington, who's currently the Chief Science Advisor to the UK government, sums this up and calls it "The Perfect Storm." And I have to say, I've stolen his wonderful terminology for his lecture. And he sees that actually in the future, we have energy demands growing by 50 percent in the next 20 years, we have water demand globally increasing by 30 percent, and food demand increasing by 50 percent in the next 20 years. And all of this is going to be on a background of climate change and feedbacks through all of them. Now, you may be rather aware that there's a -- how should I put it -- there's a hysteria that comes across when you talk about global population and climate change. I actually love this one. It's a sort of wonderful oxymoron. So I'm going to try and deal with population first. So why do we have a large population? It's because of the demographic transition. So in the bad old days we had high mortality rate, high fertility rate. So people had lots of babies, most of them died. Population doesn't change. But then with of course, the revolution in healthcare and understanding of how we actually keep mothers and children alive through their young lives, how we actually eradicate certain major diseases, we then reduced that mortality rate, but we still have high fertility. Therefore, lots of children are being born who survive into adulthood and therefore you have high population growth. And then as you see, most societies then transition through this to then actually add low fertility. So people then start deciding to have much smaller families as their children survive, and that gives you a low population growth. And you can actually look at this globally. You can see the distribution of the different countries and how their population has expanded. This is a wonderful geographer's tool where you take a country and actually expand the size of it based on its population. And again, if we look, okay, Indian and China are very obvious, but they're very obvious on a geographical map anyway. But look at the UK -- very large, big blob when we look at population. So what about the UN forecasts? Well, when I first wrote this slide which was earlier this year it was about 6.9 billion. Predictions are by the end of this year we should hit 7 billion, and the predictions are that actually by the middle of and the end of this century, we should hit about 9 billion people, an extra 2 billion people in the next 90 years. Now, if we look at the demographic transition, and this graph shows you beautifully the percentage change in population, you can see that the biggest rise in global population occurred at the end of the 1960s when we peaked at about 2 percent growth every annum of population. Since then as you can see, it is a downward trend, and actually the big question is whether it continues down the red line, the blue line or the green line, which again classic in sort of stats whether it is a high, low or a medium prediction for the future. And the way that affects global population is as follows. So I've taken all the way back to the 1700s. You can see that if we look at the medium, the blue one, which is the one which is thought to be the most reasonable, you can see that we peak about 9, and actually even if we go out to 200, 2200, we then drop slightly to 8 and a half billion. Because you find that once you actually move into that low fertility, low mortality area, actually many countries are having shrinking populations. There are other predictions which look less favorable. However, if you look at the percentage chances, we are going to be somewhere in that middle. So it's not the runaway population that everybody worries about, and therefore, is it something we can actually deal with as a human society? But there's always people that say, how will we feed all these people? I can hear them in the street shouting now. Think how much carbon dioxide they're going to produce. They're going to make global warming worse. There is a whole raft of people suggesting that actually if we provide actually fertility control in countries to reduce the number of people being born, that will prevent them producing carbon dioxide, therefore slowing global warming. Some very interesting moral arguments there. So let's look at the money. I always like to follow the money. This is the money growth over the -- oh, look, from the 1600s actually all the way through. As you can see with the astronomical rise in the wealth of the planet, money is not actually the problem, and we know that. I look around here. You are at least twice as wealthy as your parents. And that's in less than 30 years. So again, the interesting thing is it's the distribution of that wealth that controls. So this is a wonderful, again, you can tell I'm a geographer. I love these maps. This is a nice interactive map. This one is by Yale University, and this first one is actually looking at population and where the big peaks in population are. If we look at GDP per year, it changes. Oh, dear, look, where the people are and where the money is are not the same thing. I'll do that again. Look at Africa, no money, lots of people. Southeast Asia, lots of people, no money. So that's the first branch. Second one is how about population growth and carbon emissions? All those new people being born, those extra 2 billion people, they're the problem. Those people are the problem. Are they? Well, if you look at carbon dioxide, so this is the temperature record for the last, from the 1600s through to the instrumental record, showing the actual turn-up of global temperatures, and these are the predictions. So we look at the blue, the green, and the red. They all show the different predictions based on how much we emit. The blue curve I like to think of as the Copenhagen worked, which it didn't. We all love each other, we're all going to be really sensible, and we're going into a low carbon world. The red one I call the George Bush business as usual, yes, we can now get to the Arctic, because it's melted; we can get more oil out. Okay. So those are the two areas, and it basically makes a difference perhaps warming by the planet by 2 degrees or over 4 degrees. And so people have come up with simplistic links. So you have carbon dioxide, which is linked to the number of people, the services that people want, the energy that those services require, and the carbon dioxide produced for those services. So for example, if you had all your electricity produced from say renewable energy, you would reduce the C02 to 0, and suddenly you wouldn't worry about the number of people. So an interesting way to actually look at it. Why are we worried about this? Well, conversions and contraction which is the basis of the UN negotiations, suggest that if we have the business as usual curve going up there, we have way too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and to stabilize the atmosphere at something like 550 parts per million, which has about a 30 percent chance of keeping us below a 2 degrees warming, we would have to follow that curve. What I love about this curve is that if I click my fingers overnight, and suddenly the rich world, and that's Annex I countries, the sort of burnt orange, if they suddenly stopped producing carbon dioxide, by 2040, the rest of the world, which is developing incredibly rapidly, would overtake this curve. And this is why both the developed and the developing world have to actually be involved in any climate negotiations to actually contract the amount that they both do. So let's look at this as total. This is slightly out of date. China and the USA are about the same now in total production, and those are the gray bars. But if we focus on the red squares, this is the amount of carbon dioxide produced per person within a country. And you can see there's a huge variety from the USA right out there and Canada down to India. The calculations done suggest that if we are going to actually try to reduce the world's carbon dioxide to a manageable level, we have to have 2 tons per person per year. That's that line, which means almost every single country including China is already above this, and the only country at the moment out of the biggest ones, is actually India, which is still below that line. That should start to tell you something, so hang on. India, very large population, it's a growing population, still has a figure per person below the magic number; whereas all the other countries don't. So is it really people that produce pollution? And I would argue -- by the way, just for your own edification, you produce about 10 to 12 tons of carbon per year just by being in this country. So actually you have to perceive in the next sort of 30 to 40 years your actual personal C02 has to drop to 2 tons per year if we're going to try and stabilize the climate. That tries to give you some idea of the actual challenge ahead. But what I want to argue is it's consumption, not people, that cause C02 to rise. SO here we have from 1990 to 2002, work by the World Resources Institute, which shows if you look at percentage growth in per capita output in USA, you find that it's grown very small, whereas in Europe it's actually dropped, whereas if you look at the total output, USA has already gone up by 20 percent, whereas in Europe the actual amount of actual C02 produced has actually dropped slightly. So again, it is not the number of people, it is the amount of carbon dioxide used by those people. If you took the richest billion people on the planet, you take out 80 percent of the emissions for the planet. So O'Neill did a wonderful study -- also, yes, beginning of this year, which actually showed that yes, population can be a control. So if you do control populations in key countries, and you'll see at the top there, USA, one person in the USA produces something like 30 times the amount of a person in India. So of course, if you stopped one person becoming an American citizen, you've saved 30 Indians. So again, it's these games, so these nods where you cannot take it down to stop population growing. Right. So how do -- oh, and the other thing that's very interesting about this was even though you looked at population, what is fundamental to this is actually how urbanization and aging occurs in different countries has a huge effect, has a much bigger effect on the amount of carbon dioxide they emit than the actual number of people. It's a very interesting concept. Right. So how does this affect disaster reduction in the face of terrible population growth and climate change? Well, I'm going to do a classic geographer's trick, which is let's look at this. Let's look at this as a triangle, a hazard or risk triangle. So the hazard could be the natural disaster, it could be hurricane, could be tsunami, it could be drought, the vulnerability, how many people are there, and then exposure, how well protected are there, are there actually services to actually protect them. And as you can see, you have a triangle in there, and if you actually reduce any one of those to zero, the risk disappears. So if you can reduce either number of people exposed, the actual exposure, how are they actually controlled, and the hazard. And I'm going to give you a few examples of this. A beautiful one is Bangladesh. Bangladesh, 1970, 300,000 people were killed by cyclones and the resultant floods. By 2007, 3,500 people were killed in cyclones and floods. And this is because the exposure was greatly reduced. The hazard is still there. Cyclones still come in, they still come in, they haven't changed the cyclones. They haven't changed the number of people. That's actually increased. It's the exposure that has been managed by good governance. This has been through early warning systems, so have a good meteorological organization that tracks these storms going in, but that's only half the story. As great scientists go, it's coming, it's coming, run away! But if that doesn't get to the people, it doesn't work, so they have a wonderful network of bicycles. And the bicycles basically send to the next village, send to the next village, almost like a chain reaction, so everybody gets to hear the news, and it's a wonderful system of communicating. They have then shelters, water, and sanitary facilities are all provided, and so this is a wonderful way of saying, the exposure has been greatly reduced, so it doesn't matter about the number of people because you've controlled it and it doesn't matter about the hazard because you've controlled it. Because human society is actually what controls risk. So what's the effect in population in climate change on this? Well, climate changes the hazard. It may increase the hazard or it may change the hazard. So for example, 10 years ago we had the first hurricane in the South Atlantic that hit Brazil. We've had heat waves in this country that we've never had before. And it's that unpreparedness which makes that change problematic. Population, growth, unfortunately changes the vulnerability. You have more people in the area, there will be more lives at risk. And exposure, that's still down to us. So I was thinking of Bangladesh, let's look at climate change. So sea level rise by 2100. This is relative sea level rise. So Bangladesh unfortunately is sinking. This is because of lack of sediment getting in because of the hydroelectric dams on the rivers to produce low carbon electricity. See, not everything is positive. And also because of the tube wells they put in there to ensure they get fresh, clean drinking water out means that the Delta's sinking about 50 centimeters per 100 years. Take a rough average of sea level rise due to global warming, that's 50 centimeters, that gives you a meter. So remember, this is a country that has done incredibly well at managing the actual problem of hurricanes and natural disasters. Climate change, however, is going to do this. Difficult to manage losing 20 percent of your country. That's the same as losing the southeast of England, including London underwater as part of the UK. So this is extreme example, but again gives you an idea of how those hazards can change. The last one I'm going to finish off with, so they'll be hopefully some times for questions, is food prices and vulnerability, because we control food prices. So this is a wonderful piece of week by a set of economists published actually only a few days ago. Saw this, and what they did was is there's huge arguments about the price spikes in food in 2008 and actually this year, huge price rises in food. Lots of arguments. Now, is this due to biofuels, is this due to the price of oil, is this because of food speculation. And they modeled all of it. And you see that the dotted line there, the blue one which they modeled, is due to ethanol production and biofuel production and inflation and oil prices, so that's all attained there. That peak there, an increase of 60 percent in the price of food, was because of food speculation. So let's pick that. So that means that gentlemen down in the city of London in very nice suits who are making lots of risky bets or speculating whether food prices go up or down, same in New York, same in all financial centers in the world, were able to increase food prices by 60 percent so people couldn't afford food. It's about governance then. So malnutrition and starvation is not about a lack of food. There are many incidences where you have major disasters where there is still grain in the food stores, such as Ethiopia in the 1980s, but the people were too poor to pay the prices for the food. We also know that we grow enough food at this moment in time to feed the world. We know that. It's just poorly distributed. And we can easily grow enough food for 9 billion, so all those people go, 9 billion people, how will we ever feed them? Very simple. At the moment, UK agriculture is 10 times as efficient as African food production. If we industrialize food production in Africa and double the amount of food, we'd only need a fifth of the area they currently use. And the other four-fifths, I would say, let's plant trees. Let's cure climate change by reforesting large areas of East Africa. That sounds incredibly simple. It's incredibly difficult to do. I'm not underestimating these challenges, but it is not because of population that we cannot feed the world. It is not because of climate change that people are dying from natural disasters. So I'm going to leave this and hopefully challenge you to have a very different way of thinking about the world, is climate change and population growth do increase the hazards, or change the hazards, and the vulnerability. But we control the exposure and the vulnerability through good governance. Thank you very much. [Applause] >> Okay, we have plenty of time for questions. I will ask when I call on you, you do not like I do, but as I say, have a microphone which we'll have some wonderful students come down and get for you. So if you could raise your hands, please if you're interested in speaking or asking a question. Yes, we have one there? [Background noise] >> Thank you. Why the concentration on C02? I mean, there are plenty of other global warming gases, water in steam is a global warming gas. Professor Ian Stewart on a TV series some years ago said the real problem was going to be the melting of Siberia and methane. >> Right, I have to say, so the question is why do I concentrate on carbon dioxide? I concentrate on carbon dioxide because if you look at the numbers, at the moment it is the biggest problem. It is not the one that's the strongest warmer. Actually, methane and nitrous oxides have a stronger warming potential per molecule. However, it's the carbon dioxide which is the bulk of the pollution going into the atmosphere. There were lots of wonderful scare stories. I know Ian very well, love his TV shows. However, burps of death from Siberia, from the deep ocean, I have to say I've been guilty of writing some of those papers as well. But actually, the real problem is our industrial pollution, which is absolutely massive and also the 20 percent of that pollution that comes from deforestation. So I haven't forgotten about the other gases, though in 25 minutes I was trying to bore them out, but they are important. But again, it's the scale of the problem. >> This gentleman here if you'll wait for the microphone and then you back there. >> Thank you. I'm still forming the question in my head really. >> That's all right. >> You had a lot of information up there, and one was on GDP growth, which showed this spike going up in the 1900s. But you also mentioned happiness early on in the conversation. Now, happiness seems to be positively correlated only up to certain point in terms of GDP growth, and GDP growth is also to some extent responsible for climate change due to the various emissions. So wouldn't it be reasonable to then say let's diminish GDP growth and we'll do everyone some good across the board, because you've spoken across the boards today. >> Well, I have to say yes, you're absolutely right. GDP is an awful measure of anything, whether it's economic growth, whether it's -- if you look -- I'm sorry; I'm going to do an aside here. If you look at the great GDP growth in this country over the last 15 years, we really grew. No, we didn't. It was actually house prices increased, which wasn't real money in your pockets. And so this is why the government successively got it wrong because actually half a percent of that growth was actually fake growth. So I completely agree. Yes, I'm twice as wealthy as my parents. I'm not twice as happy as my parents, so yes, there is a disconnect. So this is why I'm more interested in redistribution. There has to be growth. Unfortunately I'm not of the camp that suggests you cannot, you have to stop growth, because having been to countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya, there has to be economic growth to actually industrialize the actual agriculture and produce a level of sophistication and economic wealth within the country. >> If you say we look across the boards -- if you say we look across the boards then yes, countries like Ethiopia and a lot of the middle income and developing countries do need to grow, but their contribution to global GDP growth is going to be modest compared to sustained economic growth of the most advanced economies, and I think that's where the cuts or the respective gains need to be made. I'm not advocating against growth, but if you say global economic growth of 2, 3, 4, 5 percent, that's going to have massive implications in terms of climate change and gas emissions. >> Oh, absolutely. And it's mainly those rich countries that are producing the gases, yep. >> [Inaudible]. >> You spoke about the demographic transition as sort of almost automatic, and so there was this peak which has slowed in the population growth. But would you say that actually the very big contributing factor was women themselves, asking for and getting access to family planning, as well as other things, the empowerment, and that that actually stopped the UN prediction of sort of soaring to 11 billion and being lower, so it's only slowed now. So that actually -- and that applies north and south, Bangladesh, actually. So do you not think that actually that's an important factor still in actually addressing population growth, the empowerment of women? >> Absolutely. I'm going to slightly disagree with you on a point. Firstly, it is actually women who control fertility, we know that. And actually, if you educate women up to secondary level, you find that actually they're understanding although on fertility and how they control their lives increases. I disagree slightly that actually it has anything to do necessarily with access to contraception. So if you looked at the great demographic transition in Europe that occurred during the Victorian Period through into the early 20th century where there were groups actively campaigning against contraception. Contraception can help, but it simply means that you cannot walk in as an aid agency and go, here you are, have a load of condoms. It doesn't work. You actually have to firstly get infant mortality rates down. Parents, mothers do not make smaller families when half their children die, because they want some to survive through into the next generation. Once that mortality has reduced and they're educated, then they will change. And again, access to contraception is variable. So for example, you find that it has nothing to do with religion, either. So you find that Italy, Brazil, Iran have actually replacement level of fertility at the moment and are going to drop below that. >> Okay, we got a question up there. >> [Inaudible] You mentioned the agreement with Copenhagen. So do you think we should have some sort of cap and trade system or carbon tax, or what sort of economic dependent should we put into place to medicate the temperature rise? >> Okay. That's a question that covers a whole course. I'm not sure how to answer that simply. I think that you need different incentives for different regions. So for example, you cannot have a global cap and trade system at this moment in time, because actually the systems aren't similar and you'd just get swamped by sort of free sort of gifts from the developing world. So again, I think it depends on the area. Europe has a cap and trade system that is working and is actually controlling emissions, and that's going to be expanded next year to include aviation. And this is what I really like, aviation for anyone who's flying into Europe or out of Europe. The American Airlines are kicking up a huge fuss. And what I love is they're using Kyoto, which they didn't sign, to argue that this is illegal. And the Europeans are just going, no, we don't care. If you come here you have to pay a carbon tax. And so there's some very interesting dynamics going on. So I'd say that's one. I think also there needs to be -- Australia's just passed a carbon tax, which is fantastic. We'll see how that works. So different areas have to have different ideas. On one of the papers, Joanne Scotoloria in IA published a month ago in Nature argued is, you just don't have one system; you need multiple levels of governance and different systems so you have redundancy so you can't play the systems. The clean development mechanism has frequently been played, and therefore they argue we have probably more CFCs in the atmosphere now than if we did not have a CDM mechanism. Because very good entrepreneurs may work how to make money out of CFCs. >> One here. >> Thank you very much for your lecture, and what policy would you suggest we implement to prevent the inflation due to -- the inflation of food prices due to speculation? What actual governance policies do you think actually can prevent that? >> Right, oh, my word, another whole lecture series. The first thing is that I would protect food and actually prevent it to being allowed to be speculated on. You basically say, this is a fundamental right; you cannot actually trade it. And you then start to remove some of those systems. You also prevent people doing short-selling, which is actually you sort of promise to buy shares in food and you wait for it to go up and down, and then you may or may not buy it but you still make money out of it. So there were lots of systems like that that economies know how to tweak to prevent food speculation. You have people down in the city of London whose sole aim is to control all of coffee production in the world. You need to actually unpick them. [Inaudible audience question] >> No, but you don't -- you can speculate on the share price of that company, so if this company's doing fantastically well that's fine, but what they're doing is speculating on the price of food and they are then guaranteeing amounts of money to the farmer, which is great but at the same time going, well, I'm going to speculate it's going up so I'm going to make a huge larger profit on there. So that's the bit that needs to be broken, but you need really good economists on that. I'm just a mere scientist. >> Question coming up there. Are there any hands over here for the next? Okay. >> How do you think we can educate people about climate change without promoting hysteria, because there's a bit of a disconnect sometimes with the way information's presented and it sort of promotes people who may be unaware of the issues not overreacting, but holding up signs, like the one you present in the PowerPoint. >> I think two ways. The first is that we need to educate the media, and it's slowly happening that this whole idea of balance, where they take the idea that you have to have somebody from the left, somebody from the right arguing. Actually, when it comes to science, actually that falls down because there are major areas of consensus. Whether it's vaccinations, whether it's GM crops, whether it's climate change, there are debates but there is also consensus. And that needs the sophistication there of the journalisms to actually understand where the balance is. So yes, I get sick and tired of actually having to always be one on one against a climate skeptic. So yes, but that needs to be eroded. What I think is interesting is I think that we believe that people don't understand climate change. Actually, when I talk to people, a lot of people understand climate change. They also have that daily mail view, which is, oh, I don't think it really is true; I think they're just trying to scare us. But actually if you pick underneath it they actually have picked up on quite a lot of the facts. The problem that they fear is disempowered, and that's the biggest problem. It's like, I can educate loads of people. I can have whole schools running around going, we're all going to die due to climate change. But what do they do about it? And the problem is because they are so global, these problems, switching off lights, saving electricity by unplugging your phone, et cetera, are symbolic but don't do anything. I think that's the real disconnect. People want to do something positive, but they can't see how they can, and I think that's why most people just go, yes, it's a problem and literally get on with their very busy, complicated lives. >> You had a question right there? Gentleman in the black shirt? >> You commented on us growing enough food for the world as it is now, and potentially for 9 billion people but it's currently unevenly distributed. And correct me if I'm wrong or if I misconstrued, but you spoke of the need to further industrialize agriculture say in like developing nations in order to create that more even distribution. I just wondered in response to that, if you had a comment on suggestions or evidence that industrialized agricultures, the world's largest contributors to C02 emissions, even more than say all the world's transport put together? >> Ah, you mean the burping cows problem, which my daughter's love because they also fart out methane as well, comes from both ends. Yes, the big problem with industrial agriculture is it is quite carbon intensive. One, if you think about it, forget even the livestock; you actually start off with the agriculture itself, the tractors, all the heavy equipment. You then have the fertilizers, which are actually very energy demanding to actually produce in the first place, and then at the end of the you then have the actual production. So if you have rice, rice paddy fields produce methane, if you have livestock they also produce methane, and so yes, there is a carbon cost. However, at the moment when it's actually causing mass deforestation in parts of Africa, if you can actually say reduce amount of land you use in Africa now to one-fifth and actually reforest the other four-fifths, you can balance these out. So no, it's not a nice, clean carbon zero system, but it goes against the argument, we can't have 9 billion people on the planet, because we can easily feed that number of people using less land than we're using now. So you're absolutely right, but we need to actually have another way of actually mitigating against that carbon cost. I prefer that than 8 million children starving every year. >> Okay, I'm afraid we're out of time.